JWT, WTF? at JS Poland

JWT, WTF? at JS Poland

We live in a world of rich client side applications, web and mobile, and we need a secure way to authenticate our users. Session IDs have been the traditional solution, but how well do they work for single page applications? And what about authenticating to 3rd party services? You can’t leave your credentials in the client, there’s always someone malicious just waiting to steal them.

Enter the JWT, or JSON Web Token. These fancy little tokens can authenticate our users and our transactions because they know what they’re allowed to do.

We’ll take a look at what JWTs can be used for, why to choose JWTs, how to generate them, and most importantly how to keep them secure. Finally, we’ll find out if putting abbreviations inside other abbreviations really is the secret to web security.